Andrew Reid

You keep banging on about "innovation" without mentioning the elephant in the room which I've pointed out time and again, that OM System have innovated jack shit and all they have done is cut & paste from Olympus. You say it looks great, aesthetically pleasing and all that, well this is subjective but I think it looks cheap for a $2000 camera and certainly worse than the E-M5 III. The size difference between the OM-1 and OM-3 is not equivalent to the GH4 v GM1, the OM-3 is wider at 140mm wide and 500g vs 590g for the OM-1 and 135mm, so a GM1 it ain't. I'll leave you to get to know your cameras better but in terms of the OM-3 whatever floats your boat I guess!

Olympus perfected it and OM System inherited it, big difference. OM system have not implemented anything big and new since 2020. Because they are an investment bank, not a camera company and certainly not a Japanese engineering company. Wrong, Fujifilm has this on the X-T5 and more. Sony has a 160MP pixel shift high-res mode. Canon has had a 400 megapixel pixel shift IBIS mode on the EOS R5 since 2020. And now Nikon with the Z8 has a 180MP mode from 47mp. How hard is it to do a bit of research my friend on Google... These are great features by Olympus, not OM System. They are inherited from a group of engineers who OM System effectively fired. How do they intend to carry these features forwards and develop them without a proper engineering team? It's by no means a bad camera. I just don't see any reason at all to buy it over the OM-1. The styling is subjective, I think it's fake looking and fugly. If you want a powerful retro styled camera for $2000 you can get a full frame Nikon Zf or some of the best APS-C cameras on the market from Fujifilm. If you want the unique Olympus features and IBIS, with a much better EVF and better ergonomics and better grip and more... you can spend as little as $1000 on a used OM-1. So the OM-3, you'd have to really really really like the way it looks to spend double for a worse camera.

Back in the 1080p days, we had line skipping and it wasn't really 1080p in a lot of cases, so a full pixel readout was needed and that's why 4K was so attractive as it would overcome the binning, downsample to whatever resolution you wanted and looked great at 1080p in most cases. Now we have a similar situation with 8K vs 4K because a lot of 4K is pixel binned from a higher resolution sensor, and 8K is a way to get that coveted full pixel readout again. Funny how history repeats itself. Just like with fascism. Anyway where was I... The current debate around specs leaves out the creative side, and that's fine... as the two can be talked about independently and are relevant to the art of cinema. What bothers me about the current state of play though is social media influencers passing off the grading or camera matching work as somehow relevant to what the camera is doing, when actually RAW can be any look you like. I also see a problem with overkill. A lot of people obsess over resolution and then go out and shoot some boring advert for Instagram. There's a lack of critical thinking there, and maybe a bit of ego.

Actually it's the camera from 2021... the sony a1. We have peaked!

Yeah, the cinematography and moody grading overcame the lack of resolution. https://www.eoshd.com/lens/kendy-ty-t2i-one-guy-amazing-things-5-year-old-dslr/ But we still feel the need (myself included) to pixel peep. I suppose it's a hobby if anything - whether it has any real creative use, is open to debate... In some way it is relevant, but it all depends on what serves the content and story, and the lighting and cinematography. Sometimes, that demands a Hi8 camcorder!

At the specs level, an image is just the sensor + processing. The processing in-camera has come on a long way as the ASIC / LSI lithography has shrunk to less than 5nm. So from the GH2 to an X-H2 there is a HUGE difference in the image processing pipeline and codec. However, with RAW the processing is up to your workstation and your eye. So there the camera processing becomes irrelevant to a large extent. So what is 'image quality' with RAW? This is the sensor alone, at least 99% and the other variables like lenses, lighting, etc. all have a huge impact on a camera test. What is the end result you see on YouTube? This is the sensor RAW + human element and the processing in post, de-bayering and compression. So the sensor becomes now around 1/5th of the mix, and the other variables like grading make up the rest which is a lot. Now, forget the test shots and add into the mix the actual content (story, sound, characters, VFX) of a creative shoot and that makes the pixel peeping aspect of things even less noticeable, but that's not to say the technical stuff isn't still important and relevant. By the way... Have any of you shot MotionCam on a high-end smartphone, it really shows this... Cinema DNG and multi-frame computational RAW photography on a smartphone has a very similar dynamic range, colour and texture as your $30,000 cinema camera. You are exchanging sensor size for temporal processing power... aka speeeeeed. So it compensates for the fact that less light is being captured in just one frame. I also think that the important bits of filmmaking far outweigh the "gap" in look between a phone and an ALEXA. If the most important thing about a scene is whether there are some details visible in a window or not, there has to be something seriously wrong with the content.

It's 100% in the grading. Why would the FX3 look like anything in particular... it's LOG.

There's a massive problem with all these tests. In the old days of GH2 vs RED, obviously the gap was pretty big, but you could still light a scene for the GH2's limitations, and fool Coppola into thinking it's a cinema camera. Now everything is 10bit LOG or RAW. So in these sort of tests you are basically watching a grading test and a test of the editor's ability to match the cameras. I mean the difference with the ALEXA is clearly there, but had you exposed for the window on the FX3 and lifted the shadows, it would be a lot closer. The difference between the BURANO / FX9 and FX3 is so small as to be practically zero, yet the price difference is many thousands of dollars / pounds. Besides, I also think that the way we watch these tests makes a further mockery of it all. Aside from being mega compressed, YouTube has no facility to download the original files, and now the original files are so enormous in 8K RAW or whatever... It doesn't even make sense to look at the original files other than to crop really close in and pixel peep. 99% of us don't have a display technology in our home to do justice to the source material... either not big enough, or not bright enough. So in a nutshell... Difference between $3k (even some $1k like used S1H) cameras and $25,000 has never been smaller in terms of image quality. The ALEXA still has a dynamic range advantage, but it's only a few stops and not noticeable in every use case. An X-H2 10 bit LOG 8K image for $1.5k is likely overkill for your display without pixel peeping or cropping. When engrossed in a movie it's unlikely an audience will even see a difference between the BURANO or a $1k mirrorless camera, yes even on a cinema screen.

Do they actually look so much better especially when you're looking at Youtube footage?

C-AF is very good, as in as fast and sticky as a latest Sony camera. The subject detection isn't as good though, it's not as reliable as the best in class systems. It keeps seeing faces on my camera shelf. Who knows maybe my lenses have become sentient? There's a neat trick I've found for the video mode... You can make the 1/2 function switch act as a stills/video mode toggle. So one click to go between the modes rather than rotating through the mode dial to Movie. You can also assign the 1.4x crop-mode to a function button to quickly get a second focal length in 4K with no loss of detail. Nifty.

The one in the middle doesn't need to exist though because it has no grip, costs $2000, has a tiny EVF from 10 years ago, and the OM-1 is much better for half the price (used, mint). Still would take a PEN-F updated with OM-1 specs but they have to stick a proper EVF in it, as the PEN-F is all about the rangefinder style handling.

Yeah it's the silence which is the problem, and the poor communication. We still have nothing to hang on, and it has sucked all the interest and appeal out of the Panasonic high-end stuff. Many have simply moved on, myself included. I just can't see what the appeal would be, however good the S1H II might be, of having to buy loads of L-mount lenses and a new camera when stuff like a used $3500 Sony a1 or Nikon Z8 exists and is more speed, specs and image quality than I'll ever really need. Even if Panasonic add an internal ND to the S1H II, and do a smaller body, and price it at $3500, there's still the problem of what lenses to put on the front. And you know what, I think they know this. Which is why they have left the high-end camera market to Leica.

Unlike the metal jackets, I bet the Shackelton still gets made in Bangladesh by people on $1 per day. At least with the cameras the person who chisels the block of aluminium is probably on a bit more than that. I hate the fashion industry with a passion, they are truly dismal hypocrites.

I reckon Sony / Leica pair-up does have a nice ring to it doesn't it? It's a Sony sensor they are using anyway so may as well cut out the middle man. It's most likely more cost effective to do this as well? Sony could build a very nice Leica Q, as they already have done similar cameras with the RX1 series. Sony would not cannibalise Leica's L-mount lenses with their own range either. It would be bad for Panasonic. But then Panasonic are more committed to green energy like batteries and digging up all the lithium for them in epic quantities. Truly a planet saving initiative.

Doesn't look like she eats many crisps. There should definitely be more thin lenses. I have become allergic to heavy stuff. I mean look at this pair... So much more fun than your average worktool + heavy work zoom

So iPhone prices then 🙂 You can get the 12S Ultra instead for under 600 euros used, and the 11 Ultra still holds up very well with the not quite as big as 1" sensor. I don't use it as a daily driver phone due to being locked into Apple. But the camera really is very special. The Leica computational modes are lovely.

I'm still rooting for Olympus, it's just that OM is a very different company. Sony's highly respected VAIO laptops ended up with them... and where are those now? OM-1 all the way for me. OM System will never be able to better it. The Japanese private equity firm inherited Olympus OM cameras in 2020. Since then 5 years have passed and they have not been able to do anything meaningful. The OM-5 was a rebadged E-M5 Mark III, and the OM-1 Mark II was a firmware update. Now the OM-3 is a parts-bin raid with the top dials from the E-M5 Mark III bin and the colour mode filter from the PEN-F! How much longer can they continue to recycle the old stuff, rather than make their own cameras, with new ideas, news sensors and technology? The crazy thing is that JIP just bought Toshiba for $15bn. They are not short of funds. JIP are a bank with megabucks. And they cannot even be bothered to spend peanuts for some much needed camera development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Industrial_Partners

Olympus were doing this level of build quality on stuff for $700. The E-M5 Mark II and Mark III. The E-M10 Mark III and IV... All had similar, if actually slightly better quality, feel and ergonomics than the new OM-3. And that was nearly 10 years ago. So for $2000 and 10 years later you'd expect some progress. Where is it? How is it better than a used OM-1 for $1k? Of course it's not. I was being sarcastic. The irony is a bit lost on you isn't it. The fact remains that OM System is not Olympus. They are basically a shell company with contractors outside of Japan. Whereas Olympus had actual engineers and a sizeable R&D budget, as well as having stamped their footprint on world photographic history for the best part of a century. If that doesn't matter, I don't know what to say to you. Enjoy your Chinese OM-3.

Ah that is indeed a lot hotter. I'd rather that than the Nikon Zf. I find the problem with all these retro digicams though is the build quality just isn't up to snuff. The Zf is far below what Nikon were doing in the DSLR days with stuff like the D7300. Feels so much cheaper. If they can increase the quality of materials, buttons and dials again... They could really do justice to a digital Nikon S3

The little girl looks like how I look at the camera shop windows. From basket-case to basket manufacturer, that suits Panasonic. I think with all the Tesla batteries, they'll be ok without TVs and cameras. Unless somehow the cameras justify their reduced presence by being relevant to other divisions... like AI imaging tech, and as a way to keep hold of their imaging engineers. Panasonic could still turn things around this year by... Higher-end S9, with built in EVF and new sensor, no crop 4K/60, and a nifty fast readout to make it more usable without a mechanical shutter for stills. S1H Mark II with stacked sensor, 8K, but as small as a Sony a1. S1 Mark II which sits above the S5 Mark II, but actually has a soul and looks like a proper camera or a Fuji. But we all know none of this is going to happen at this point 🙂 If it was, it would have already!

Hmm. Have you used the Xiaomi 14 Ultra? Now that is a proper Leica camera phone.

I wish I could say I am invested in L-mount at the moment... But I'm not. It would take something seriously special to tempt me back into the system now. They have just gone so long without the new Panasonic cameras, I had no reason to buy any lenses. And without any native lenses, a big investment is needed to make full use of an S1H Mark II or whatever's next. Not for me. I'll pass.

Canon will come with two new cameras this year, a retro mirrorless RF mount body and a high-end compact named the V1. This is an interesting move as it would be first new large sensor compact for quite a while. But the excitable rumours seem to have misunderstood what the V means. Whereas G is the proper high-end compact range, V is a hateful little line that already has a V10 in it https://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-PowerShot-V10-Vlogging-Starter/dp/B0C4XSM4YM/ It's very expensive and basically resembles a webcam. It had a 2 inch... yes... that small in 2023, at a piffling 460,000 resolution as if it came from 2005. It had a fixed 18mm equiv. F2.8 prime lens and 1" sensor... but not the good Sony 1" stacked sensor... it was a cripple hammered 15 megapixel version. This year's new V1 will just be a repeat of this with a slightly larger sensor. What interests me about the current demand for compact cameras is stuff like this... Back in 2010 Canon released the G12 which is currently one of the most popular CCD compacts lusted after by Gen Z... It fetches upwards of $350 on eBay now. Just 2 years later however Canon made a Micro Four Thirds Canon Compact, the G1 X and that would be the final "golden era" Powershot G digicam. After that they sadly moved away from the G10/G12 style body onto the G1 X Mark II which had the design panache of a wheelie bin. The G1 X Mark III is the most recent, but with a slow lens that doesn't really make use of the APS-C sensor. As you can see the G1 X had a sensor actually as close in size to Canon APS-C as it was to Micro Four Thirds. Almost as tall, at least, in a 4:3 aspect ratio. It has the popular Gen-Z fun factor features.... you can close the screen and use the optical viewfinder, pretending that it's a disposable camera.... built in flash... RAW and for selfies the screen can turn around. This is a really underrated camera today if you can pick one up for cheap. Shouldn't Canon be doing more stuff like this rather than updating the V10?

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Magnetic-Smartphone-Bluetooth-Compatible-Shooting/dp/B0CFPJXXM6/ The same thing is 30 quid on Amazon. Which leads me to a crafty sneaky idea... What if we were to put a red dot on that? And buy 90 or so?